Indiana made her get a job. Then took her baby because it wouldn't pay for childcare.

I did everything they told us to do. Worked the schedule. Scrimped the grocery list. Told myself somebody, somewhere, had a plan for families like mine.

Then I read about a mother in Indiana who did every single thing the state demanded of her. Got the state-required job. Followed every rule. And the state still kept her baby in foster care, because the state couldn’t be bothered to fund the childcare that would have let her actually keep him.

Read that twice. The state required her to work. She worked. The state refused to pay for the childcare that made the work possible. So the state took her kid.

That is not a glitch. That is the bill.

The Associated Press counted hundreds of thousands of children on childcare-assistance waitlists across 23 states and DC. Three more states don’t even keep a list — they just tell eligible families to fuck off. Indiana ran out of money and started waitlisting families who had already qualified for the subsidy. A medical technician in Indiana stopped buying groceries and went to food banks to pay for her infant’s care.

This is what “family values” looks like when the family-values party writes the budget. Demand mothers work. Make the safety net conditional on a paycheck. Underfund the childcare that would make the paycheck cover anything. Then wag your finger at the mother when the math doesn’t work and her kid ends up in state custody.

Three-step scam, and Indiana’s statehouse is running it. So are 22 other states with the same waitlist play. Donor-owned dickweeds and Waffle House oligarchs who think a tax cut for yacht-club arsonists is more moral than a childcare subsidy for a working mother bankrolled this shit. The medical technician at the food bank is living it. The mother whose baby is still in foster care is living it.

She did the work. The state took her baby because she couldn’t do the arithmetic the state demanded, and they still call it fucking personal responsibility. That isn’t a budget shortfall. That’s a cruelty budget, and a baby in state custody is the receipt.

Take the family-values sign off the podium and shove it. Eat shit. You knew goddamn well what you were doing when you underfunded that program and you watched the waitlist grow anyway. Don’t tell me about personal responsibility when the personal responsibility you demanded came with a foster-care bed.

Source story: Hundreds of thousands of children sit on childcare assistance waitlists.